i thought my post was already too long to include this, but to your point, you can run AI inference in this setup and the performance can be pretty good.
Yeah it is obviously actually useful for AI inference over which the pcie speed isn't particularly important and a single board computer gets you a small system.
Whatever, Glide was amazing! So much so that Nvidia bought them.
I remember what a huge difference it was having a dedicated 3D card capable of fast 2D and 3D vs the software rasterizer. Yes, NovaLogic games ran better. Yes, you can play Doom at decent FPS. Yes, SpecOps ran at full monitor resolution. They had a LOT to brag about.
Glide is precisely what made me hate 3dfx and was glad they died.
As a developer, I'm sure Glide was great.
But as a kid that really wanted a 3dfx Voodoo card for Christmas so I could play all the sweet 3D games that only supported Glide, I was upset when my dad got me a Rendition Verite 2200. But I didn't want to seem ungrateful, so my frustration was pointed to 3dfx for releasing a proprietary API.
I was glad that Direct3D and OpenGL quickly surpassed Glide's popularity.
But yeah, then 3dfx failed to innovate. IIRC, they lagged behind in 32-bit color rendering support as well as letting themselves get caught with their pants down when NVIDIA released the GeForce and introduced hardware transform which allowed the GPU to be more than just a texturing engine. I think that was the nail in 3dfx's coffin.
lol, agreed. Today, Glide feels like a predecessor to OpenGL. At the time it was awesome but as soon as DirectX came around along with OpenGL it was over. 1999 was the beginning of the NVidia train.
Thanks for the laugh about your disappointment with your dad. I had a similar thing happen with mine when I asked for Doom and him being a Mac guy, he came back with Bungie’s Marathon. I was upset until I played Marathon… I then realized how wise my father was.
this is mostly right, but it's not true that you can just sign up at any time. there's an open enrollment period for the aca marketplace and if you miss it, you won't have the opportunity to buy health insurance until next year.
Maybe in aggregate flights have fewer delays but every single flight I’ve taken this year has been delayed (on top of the padded flight times the article mentions). I’ve flown about half a dozen trips.
I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem. Airlines have exclusivity on airport gates. Any frequent flier on the SFO -> EWR route knows that if you want to save money you can book an Alaska flight instead of United but Alaska has significantly fewer gates and usually gets delayed when arriving waiting for one. Flights aren’t exactly equal commodities and even if the airlines were well-run, contracts for these gates are locked in.
Pricing stats here also fail to account for business class vs economy pricing. Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI. In some cases prices have doubled or more since COVID.
Perhaps the free market is solving the pricing/timeliness problem, but your fellow travelers value lower prices more than being on time?
> Business class prices on
> tickets have skyrocketed
The people with more disposable income who are subsidizing air travel for the rest of us are giving us an even larger subsidy these days? I feel just terrible about that.
It’s not that simple. Business is representing an ever increasing % of travellers, so airlines are increasing the % of business class seating, leaving fewer seats for economy seating and therefore less availability in economy, so you might not even end up seeing the savings in your flight ticket since more economy passengers are competing with each other.
They're degrading economy to the point where people feel like they have to upgrade. I'm not that tall or large but I can no longer tolerate American's economy seating, my knees are jammed into the seat in front of me before they recline, it's down right painful if they choose to recline.
Live in DFW, which is an American hub and my largest option for direct flights and flight availability in general which is why I mention them
Business class tickets are bought by companies not people. You pay for that "subsidy" through more expensive products to pay for that exec's stupid flight to a symposium where they all talk about how great they are and how important their ideas are.
Every time I've flown First/Business class, it's been out of my own pocket. Every time I've had my employer pay for a flight, it's been in cattle class.
Now I'm wondering what percentage of people in First/Business class are paying for the flight themselves.
I fly frequently on average more than once a month and I really don’t see the benefit of first class for domestic flights. I am short though. I’m good with exit row seats.
We aren’t budget travelers and we have been on a plane for leisure 12+ times a year since 2021. We are both Platinum Medallion on Delta and get automatic C+ upgrades at time of booking and enjoy our lounge access (via credit cards).
Domestic at least, I expect a lot is upgrades for status travelers (who have flown a lot of it on company expense accounts). At least that's my experience.
In semi-retirement, I probably do need to burn down my points though.
I think the average flyer can be pretty confident that they're saving more on the flight than the incremental addition to their grocery bills attributable to company executives' flight costs...
YUP! As usual HN downvotes the truth! I have NEVER seen a business who is willing to let people actually travel in business class outside of the C suite and even then I've seen them refuse it for C suite!!!
This includes for people making 500K+ a year. Still forced to sit in coach unless they pay out of pocket.
Normies ruined business class. Can't get business class tickets on international flights for anything less than 10X and often more like 20X the price of economy. It should be no more than 4X.
> Pricing stats here also fail to account for business class vs economy pricing. Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI. In some cases prices have doubled or more since COVID.
Sure, but business class is still 100% full (and frequent fliers complain that they aren't getting upgrades, so it seems to be mostly paid).
This is like when companies complain that they can't find any good devs, but don't want to pay market rate.
> I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem.
It's odd that in his rush to point the finger at the government monopoly, he seems to have missed that a free market where customers select flights mostly on price naturally tends towards airlines operating lower cruise speeds for better operating economy, and not allowing loads of wiggle room in their schedules to make up for delays.
The idea that actually the real reason why aircraft are operating more slowly and delayed more is because there aren't enough ATCs in position doesn't pass the sniff test at all for anyone that knows the slightest thing about commercial aviation
> The idea that actually the real reason why aircraft are operating more slowly and delayed more is because there aren't enough ATCs in position doesn't pass the sniff test at all for anyone that knows the slightest thing about commercial aviation
Well... I mean, objectively, there are not enough ATCs. Staff are being scheduled 6 days a week. Towers at small airports are operating on reduced hours because there aren't enough people, and towers are some airports are being operated with less than full staff (so each person is working multiple tasks).
Whether or not the very real staff shortage is what is causing the delays is not 100% clear. My intuition is that it is, but I don't have any actual data to support that.
Ground delays due to ATC staffing shortages are real. It’s not a secret, statistics about it are kept.
Off the top of my head, it is has affected Austin, Newark and most major destinations in Canada this year. That is not an exhaustive list by any means.
They're real and tracked, but they're also not the main reason why airlines aren't on time, or any sort of reason for lower cruise speeds.
We've got percentages for delays attributed to the National Aviation System (including those for reasons other than ATC understaffing, like congestion management) here[1], it's less than half of those attributed to the carrier, with a slight trend fall. That doesn't mean ATC understaffing isn't a problem (patching gaps in shift patterns is bad for a whole bunch of safety related reasons, for a start), it means that the author is dead wrong that airlines won't do anything to jeopardise on time performance and government must be the only bottleneck.
[1]https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/inf...
The author did not claim that the entire or the main reason for longer flight times was ATC delays. He wouldn’t be dead wrong if he had made that claim since as you note, ATC delays are higher than they were in the 90s. But he didn’t make the claim that ATC was the full and only cause of delays.
His conclusion is that there are a multitude of causes, among them, ATC staffing delays.
The author explicitly dismissed the idea of "greedy airlines" as not passing his "sniff test" whilst the data shows their own actions are a more frequent culprit for delays than aviation services (be they ATC shortages or congestion, which combined only account for <20% of the delays; unlikely to cause of a fourfold increase in long delays by themselves never mind be a reason for slower cruising speeds).
I doubt an economist a little less enthusiastic about the ability of markets to give people exactly what they want than Max would have missed the obvious dynamic that when airlines are competing mainly on price in a thin-margin capital-intensive industry they absolutely can capture market share (from paying customers, not just points collectors) by accepting the risk of degraded service.
Lower speeds to save on fuel as closing on sound barrier has somewhat sharp increase in air resistance.
Also I think in general increasing utilization of aeroplanes increases revenues and thus makes things more profitable as money is not made while not flying. Easiest way to achieve this is to remove slack like shortening turnover times. Which then results in cascading delays as planes simply are not available at times.
Why does Alaska schedule more flights than they have gate slots? Or is it just that anything that delays gate availability is going to impact them first?
May also happens to be the month construction began on one of EWR’s two commonly used runways (though they do have a smaller third runway). This severely reduced the amount of traffic the airport could handle and EWR attempted to keep operating the same amount of scheduled flights as usual, it was a real mess.
runway construction is only part of the story, i think. in May, there was a number of complete ATC meltdowns causing ground stops. if you look at the stats, the majority of delays at newark in May are attributed to ATC.
granted this was an especially egregious situation and not the norm, but it feels like these types of issues are on the rise based on my anecdotal experience. there were a number of full ground stops at newark due to ATC in the weeks after this. it was national news.
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
i think there are a lot of folks who would be willing to have a 27% discount (allow for ~3% card processing fee) and forego those features.
if apple was saying you had to support their payment processor alongside others (so you could opt into paying +27% and getting easy cancellations), that would be one thing, but they don't allow you to have any other options available in the app, which i think is where the anticompetitive complaints start to feel more valid.
> i think there are a lot of folks who would be willing to have a 27% discount (allow for ~3% card processing fee) and forego those features.
This makes sense because companies are used to making 70%, so obviously when given the choice to make 30% more overnight they will simply lower prices to avoid having to deal with all that extra revenue
Unlike phone platforms, phone apps are a fairly competitive market, and competitive markets have low margins.
Which means that if you remove 30% of revenue as a cost, one of two things happens. Either the price comes down because the suppliers who lower their price get more business, or the customers aren't very price sensitive in which case developers who use the additional money to improve their apps get more of the market and then users get better apps.
Either of those is better for the customer than having the money go into a megacorp's money bin and have them use it for competition-reducing M&A or unrelated empire-building projects or just have them add it to their cash mountain and have the customer paying that money in exchange for nothing.
> This makes sense because companies are used to making 70%,
I would love to live in the world you're living in where companies have 70% margin on $5 apps and $10/month subscriptions. And where they ever had those margins.
It's the other way around. The app devs select the nominal price and offer it on platforms that don't take the massive cut - on their website, for example. And when Apple forces them to give up 30% of their revenue, they instead raise the price and pass the extra cost to the consumers.
That is bad enough. But here comes the infuriating part. Many app devs don't want their customers to pay extra. But Apple forbids them from providing an alternative payment interface or even informing the customers that such an option exists. And the icing on the cake is that Apple used to forbid the app developers from even providing an alternative, until the courts forced their hand. Is this an anticompetitive practice or just plain extortion?
But if you ask Apple or their fanbase, they would say that it takes resources to review and host the apps. But that rings hollow when you consider all the other ways in which Apple wrings both app developers and customers dry. Then perhaps allow the users to sideload the apps? Oh no! That will break Apple's perfect safety record. How about just making it slightly hard instead? No! The user must be protected at all costs, including by holding them hostage! At this point, I'm convinced that either Apple is astroturfing, or the fans suffer from an extreme form of Stockholm syndrome, or both.
don't the incentives seem wrong? they're limited to 10% margin so what's the incentive for them to keep costs down for consumers? they only make more money when the costs go up.
It's called a perverse incentive, and it's really common when politicians think themselves economists.
The one that bugs me the most is that the margin generated by credit and debit card transaction fees is similarly limited in the US, but insuring transactions against fraud is part of the costs. Because of this, US credit card transactions are like a playbook of what not to do in security.
i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software.
1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion.
2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application.
3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance.
there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
Fair bit of that can be done with Proxmox now. What esxi has going for it from what I hear is the ability to deal with 100/1000s of hosts over many many nodes and Proxmox struggles with that
can you speak to how that is vs the gui web interface goodness of proxmox? I'm interested in playign with ganeti but all the youtube walkthroughs that would motivate me more are super outdated and the website doesn't really sell the product very well.
> vsan... a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure.
In every scenario that we spec'd out vSAN for production use it came in at least two times as expensive as your average dual controller, HA capable, storage array.
vSAN pricing is all about what the sales guy is willing to do to make the rest of the sale. It has zero marginal cost if they can get you on the platform and using their ecosystem of tools and software.
In edge deployments where rack space is tight it's actually a great solution if you only have a few U to work with and have a HA requirement for a legacy app as well.
good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
it was pretty noticeable to me. i don't think it's the groundwater specifically but they started treating the water with chlorine as part of the change, which you can definitely taste. i installed a filter under the sink and at least that fixed the problem for me... but it did make me reflect on what's in our water, in general.
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